A new report has found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing, while companies are slashing the median pay of workers. Also, Donald Trump’s allies are growing increasingly concerned about his campaign, with some who are close to the former president saying that its almost like he’s trying to lose. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A new report’s found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing while companies are slashing the median pay for the people who are getting the job done. The workers. I love this fact that Bernie Sanders seemed to be the only person that had enough sense to say, wait a second. There needs to be some cost for a CEO getting five or 600 times the amount of money that the worker’s getting. The worker is the person that’s making the CEO look good. The worker is delivering and the CEO is getting paid 500 times what the worker’s being paid. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This new study found that over the last year, just the last year, CEO pay has gone up 11%, worker pay has declined by 9%. So there is now an even, a 20 point larger gap than there was before. So CEOs, not only are the companies making more money than ever, they have fully recovered from the pandemic numbers, but workers are making less on average,
Mike Papantonio: This number says 251 times, 250, now this is the median number.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Understand that’s the median number. That’s not with the typical CEO getting paid 500 times, but the median number, just the median number alone is 250 times. And so how do you solve it? What’s the solution there? And the solution is to say, okay, if we’ve got a company, and this is Bernie’s solution, it’s at least the beginning, if a CEO is making 50 times what a worker is making, there’s gotta be some tax. Now, the problem I have with that is that doesn’t really help the worker. You follow me. The tax, that’s where this all goes astray. The government collecting tax money still doesn’t help that worker. There’s got to be something more direct where the government’s not making that money, but the worker is benefiting. And to say, well, we know this, some people have already tried it. You’ve got places where they’ve already tried this. It doesn’t do anything for the worker. All it does is makes more tax money for that entity. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. The cities that have done this, or the states that have done this, say, hey, well look, we are bringing in more revenue. And the workers at these companies say, well, okay, wonderful for you. What about me? Like, you said you were gonna help me and I have nothing. My life has not changed. And a lot of times also, these corporations, if they do get hit with a tax like this.
Mike Papantonio: They pass it on.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’ll look for loopholes too. And they’ll say, okay, well you’re talking about salary. So your base salary is gonna be a million dollars. Your bonus at the end of the year is gonna be 50 million and you can’t touch that because that’s not part of your regular pay. So they will find a way around it if that happens. But what has to happen here is that we have to get price gouging under control to help the consumers and we have to put some kind of protection in place for these workers to make sure that when the company does better, they’re doing better as well.
Mike Papantonio: I thought this was so San Francisco. San Francisco, they tried doing some variation of this. Well, San Francisco made $137 million in tax money for the city, but the workers didn’t benefit one dime. So as we look at this, you gotta say, okay, well what is really gonna protect the workers? What kind of mandate are we gonna give the CEO to say, look, no, 500 times what the worker’s making doesn’t make any sense? And it’s gotta be something besides a tax. Bernie at least is onto something here. It’s let’s do something. But it’s gotta be something not that the government makes money, but the worker actually benefits.
Mike Papantonio: Donald Trump’s allies are growing increasingly concerned about his campaign with some who are close to the former president saying that it’s almost like he’s trying to lose this election. There’s no doubt that his campaign is faltering, whether he can change it, it’s up to him. It’s really up to him. But this petulant child thing that’s going on is really hurting him. I mean, we kind of accept that that’s the way he’s gonna do things all the time. That’s a good shot. But he’s going over, why not talk about policy. Right? Compare his policy to Harris’s policy is what his advisors are telling him. Instead, he wants to make up names like a fifth grader child. It’s always been his MO, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And that’s what’s so weird about it is none of this is unexpected, but at least in the past he had, whether you agreed with these ideas or not, he had things he would say that also sounded like policy.
Mike Papantonio: Presidential.
Farron Cousins: Well, build the wall. Let’s stop the immigrants from coming over here. And that was, to a degree, that is technically a policy and it is something that obviously in 2016 and 2020, his base rallied around that idea. But he’s not even doing anything close to that anymore. He’s just out there saying, well, the images of people at her rallies, those are fake. Uh, let me try to test a new nickname for her this week because the other ones didn’t work.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, even the nicknames, you look at it and you just go, what the hell?
Farron Cousins: Kamabla
Mike Papantonio: Kamabla. And then he says, his response is, I know what I’m doing. Hush. I know what, that’s literally what he’s saying right now. So, I don’t know. You know, there’s some question about whether he has PTSD on the attempted assassination.
Farron Cousins: I’ve seen that. And honestly, that makes sense. If that is what the campaign wanted to go out there with a message of, that actually may work at this point to say, listen, the guy was a half an inch away from having his head blown off on live TV. That’s gonna mess with anybody. So give him time, give him space. We’re gonna right the ship. But he’s put what I think is just the dumbest people possible in charge of his campaign, because he doesn’t reward intelligence or capability. It’s all about loyalty.
Mike Papantonio: No, it’s all basic. It’s apeism. I call it apeism. Well, okay, here you’ve got, for example, why do you go after Brian Kemp? What did that do in the big picture? He was angry at Kemp because Kemp didn’t do what he wanted to do. He didn’t do his bidding. So he makes an attack there. He attacks everybody rather than just saying, look, stop it. Hush, you idiot. Start talking about policies. You can talk about policies, but this fifth grade attack of everybody who’s not his friend has just become, it’s like a petulant child. It’s like, Frank Luntz says, shut up. Shut up, and go talk like a president. I don’t know that he’s capable of doing it.
Farron Cousins: I don’t think at this point in his life, he is at all. And it’s also, what’s so weird about it is remember in 2020 towards the end stretch there, his campaign was starting to do a little worse. So what did he do? He finally said, let me bring in an actual Republican that knows what they’re doing. He brought in Karl Rove.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, yeah.
Farron Cousins: Because we sat here and talked about that at the time.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, exactly.
Farron Cousins: It didn’t help him to the degree he thought it would, but he did it a little too late.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they know he’s still well in striking distance. There’s nothing going on out there that he’s going, oh my God, it’s over. That’s why the advisors need to advise. But I don’t know if you can advise him, that’s the problem.
Farron Cousins: No, he’s 78 years old. He is set in his way. And back in 2016, this bullying, this name calling, that worked. He got past Hillary Clinton, threw her off her game with nothing more than these insults. But he saw the success of it one time and thought, well, okay.
Mike Papantonio: This works.
Farron Cousins: This is what I am.
Mike Papantonio: Let do it again.
Farron Cousins: And it’s just, it’s not sticking.
Mike Papantonio: Look, listen to him talk. I mean, very, very, very, very, this is very, it’s like a fifth grader. And so you take that and you say, okay, well why should we expect anything else? But he’s killing himself. Okay. He’s taken an election that’s his to lose. Really. I still think it’s his to lose. But if you look at it at this point, if he keeps this up, it’s over, man.
Farron Cousins: Well, and a month ago, November was gonna be a bloodbath for the Democrats. Probably losing the Senate. Definitely not getting the House. And of course, losing the presidency. And because of just the way he is, not listening to smart people, because the smart people are out there. They’re on Fox News every day.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they are. They’re telling him, shut up.
Farron Cousins: They’re on social media. They’re texting him saying, just stop it.
Mike Papantonio: I know. You can’t help it. You can’t turn that around.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
